The teacher said “You can read the Bible either way.
Both ways of reading it are fine.” "
What you here call "literal" I call "traditional" and the reason is, nobody really knows the "literal" meanings of ancient words from, say, 3,000+ years ago.
Yes, we can make educated guesses and there are traditional translations & exegeses.
But every word today is freighted with meanings it acquired over the millennia since then.
So, nobody today knows for certain exactly what the original shepherds & priests understood by the words they first heard at the time.
So it's impossible today to have a "literal" understanding of Biblical words.
Fortunately... fortunately... and again this is all just my opinion -- it doesn't really matter if we understand exactly, precisely what was originally intended.
The reason is that God always speaks to us in language we do understand, He does not hide His intentions in indecipherable code words.
His clear words always call us to our highest natures, our profoundest understandings, our clearest visions and our most moral behavior.
In Genesis we learn that God created the Universe, the Earth and life.
The text does not tell us how He did it but does leave some fascinating clues -- interesting but irrelevant since what matters are God's intentions, plans & reasons for creation, all of which fly in the face of modern nihilistic understandings.
At least as early as Christian theologians like St. Augustine of Hippo (circa 400 AD), it was understood that the Bible and science might **seemingly** contract each other.
Augustine's answer (like yours) was, in such cases, to treat the Bible as metaphor.
Here is the famous quote from St. Augustine on that.